French President Emmanuel Macron has issued a stark warning to Europe, highlighting the urgent need to confront Russian aggression and bridge the technological gap with America and China. Proposing substantial state investment in defence and high-tech innovation, Macron’s vision aims to fortify Europe’s position. However, scepticism looms over the feasibility of his ambitious plans. As Macron prepares to present his proposals at the European Political Community Summit, the fate of a continent hangs in the balance.
Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.
R.W. Johnson
The French President, Emmanuel Macron, has effectively laid down a challenge to the rest of Europe, warning that European civilisation is threatened by its failure to defend itself against Russian encroachment and its simultaneous failure to match the high tech achievements of America and China. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___ His solution is to call for vastly greater state investment both in defence and in high tech innovation, including AI and quantum computing. Macron aims to put these plans before the new 45 member European Political Community (EPC), which includes non-EU states and which is a purely geographical representative of the whole of Europe. This will happen at the EPC Summit to be held in Blenheim Palace, in Britain, in July.Â
This is nothing if not ambitious and many voices are already writing off Macron’s initiative as Quixotic. Yet no one doubts that he is right. Europe has fallen badly behind in high tech and with American commitment to Europe less certain than before and its focus ever more on China and the Indo-Pacific, Europe simply has to be able to defend itself. As Macron points out, if Russia is not stopped in Ukraine then the Baltic states, Moldova, Poland and Rumania will all be threatened. And if Putin is able to win in Ukraine it will embolden every other dictator in the world. Already Russia is conducting hybrid warfare against its neighbours – cyber attacks on their communications, disabling the GPS on which their airlines depend, using refugees to crowd up against their borders and so on. There is no doubting its aggression.
The EPC is Macron’s creation and it was motivated by the need to somehow re-include Britain in Europe after the disaster of Brexit, the vote of no confidence in the EU by one of its major members. The way this happened is often misunderstood. Britain was initially persuaded to join what was then called the Common Market as a purely commercial project. The prime minister, Edward Heath, promised that there would be no surrender of national sovereignty. Indeed, he asked his Lord Privy Seal, Earl Jellicoe, to examine the Treaty of Rome and other EEC documents and report back. Jellicoe reported that indeed there would be grave implications for national sovereignty if Britain joined. Heath suppressed Jellicoe’s report which surfaced only many years later. Meanwhile British opinion polls showed that there was almost invariably a large and steady majority of voters opposed to EEC/EU membership. This drew virtually no comment: EEC membership was a fait accompli and most politicians treated opposition to it as mere lunatic fringe activity.
Brexit is often discussed as if it was a British failing, yet really – and quite clearly – it was an EU failure. When Britain joined Europe in 1973 its policy-makers anticipated that Britain would join the Franco-German axis which dominated the EU, forming a new troika. This would create a new European equilibrium with Britain and France together more than balancing Germany and the two nuclear states of Britain and France would provide the basis for a Europe well able to defend itself. But this didn’t happen. To Britain’s great frustration whenever any initiative was discussed at a certain point the French and Germans would go into a huddle and whatever they decided would then become The Solution. No matter what Britain did it would always find itself excluded from that final huddle and the rule of the Franco-German condominium continued as before. The result was that the EU developed in ways that alarmed Britain, with an ever greater encroachment on national sovereignty.
This gradually led to the rise of anti-EU populism under Nigel Farage and, crucially, the conversion of an increasing number of centrist Conservatives to the anti-EU cause. Thus Michael Gove, a natural Tory moderate, explained how fed up he had become as a minister to find his freedom of action almost entirely circumscribed by EU rules: national sovereignty had gone. One British political leader after another talked of Britain taking a leading role in Europe (it was one of Tony Blair’s favourite themes) but the awkward truth, which could not be disguised, was that the Franco-German axis continued to hold sway and Britain was excluded. Anyone who had bothered to read the opinion polls down the years was thus in no way surprised when, finally given the chance to express themselves on the subject, British voters voted NO. Yet there is no doubt that if British entry had resulted in a new troika, enabling Britain to play the leading role it had anticipated, then Britain would still be in the EU today.
As one looks at that long period of Franco-German leadership one can see some large achievements, above all the extension of EU membership to 27 states and, more dubiously, the creation of the Euro. But one is also struck by how inward-looking and trivial much of its activity was – legislating to ensure the sanctity of original trademarks so that, for example, champagne can only be produced in France; careful specification of the right size and standard for all manner of foods, and an absurdly expensive Common Agricultural Policy, pampering European farmers, when it would have been more sensible for Europe to buy much of its food cheaply on world markets and concentrate on high-end industries and services. And rules, rules, rules, trying to harmonise everything from electric plugs to fiscal policy.
Yet, dare one say it, there has been a distinct lack of ambition. When Britain was still a member the EU had a population of over 500 million and was the largest, richest
market in the world. How does it happen that Russia which is far poorer and has less than one third of that population, nonetheless surpasses the EU in defence, space and a number of other scientific fields ? How come that America, with a much smaller population, nonetheless has most of the world’s top tech companies and its top universities ? How does it come about that in the crucial fabrication of computer chips the EU is not even competitive with Taiwan or South Korea ?
The fact is that Macron should be looking back at all this with considerable regret. For one of the great gains of British EU entry could and should have been the development of a united European defence effort and had there been a sufficiently large EU research budget Europe might have developed high-tech industries able to compete with Apple, Google and Microsoft. Airbus successfully competes with Boeing, after all. Those objectives were far more important than merely allowing the unelected European Commission more and more power at the expense of the Community’s national states. But for such an ambitious programme to get off the ground there would have to have been a huge and continuous co-operation between Britain, France and Germany.
Take defence: the first step would have to have been a united European military command, grouping the general staffs of Britain, France and Germany. Setting that up and ensuring that it didn’t undermine the joint commitment to NATO would have been a large and delicate task. Then one would have needed a similar and ongoing process of harmonising and integrating the defence industries of the European Big Three. All of this would have been expensive, would have needed the full-time attention of the French, British and German defence ministers and would have needed the fully committed back-up of their defence bureaucracies over a period of years. At the end of this enormous task one would have had a single, powerful and nuclear-armed European force using standardised British, French and German weapons. At which stage other European states could have been invited to join as well. If all 28 members had been invited to join at the outset the result would have been a hopeless Tower of Babel. The political reality is that such large initiatives require concentrated leadership.
The creation of European high tech industries would have had to be similarly concentrated among the Big Three at first – for they had promising computer companies like ICL, Usines Bull and Nixdorf. If there was a big enough EU research budget such companies might have grown to compete with the US tech titans, though this would have been the fruit of a decades-long effort requiring continuous concertation. None of this happened and one by one those companies disappeared. It’s the same in defence. In World War II Germany pioneered the world’s first rockets, its first jet fighters and its best tanks and Britain led the way in radar but today the US easily leads the EU in all those technologies.
The problem Macron has got now is that the EU decision, instead, to keep “deepening” Europe – for example, making immigration policy a European rather than a national prerogative – alienated the British. The European troika never formed and the EU was never willing to take on such huge and ambitious tasks as building a united defence establishment, its own high tech industries or even ensuring that its best universities were competitive with the top American ones. The result is the sort of Europe we see today: unable to defend itself and buying from abroad all its high-tech equipment. And Macron’s new alternative, the EPC, a huge body which meets only for one day twice a year, is surely too amorphous, fragile and insubstantial to carry out the gargantuan tasks Macron now proposes for it.
Nonetheless, Macron is still right and if Europe can find the right leadership it should advance in the directions he indicates. Though Macron is right, too, to point out that the EU will never get where it wants if it continues to try to ensure that every member gets back roughly what it puts in. Dynamic development never works that way, it is always uneven – and usually geographically concentrated.: think of how the industrial revolution developed first in Britain and only gradually spread elsewhere. The crux of the problem is leadership. If the EU remains a large, placid community dominated by its bureaucracy, it will never lead the world. Its “natural” leader was undoubtedly Germany but World War II has ruled that option out. The only real alternative was a Franco-British-German troika. And it still is.
Read also:
